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Niall McClelland content to just see what happens

When you walk into a Niall McClelland show, you expect certain things: an unabashed love of rough materiality, an embrace of contingency, a beginning with no end. Hot Sauce, his new show at Clint Roenisch, doesn’t disappoint.

Five huge canvases dangle unceremoniously from nails in the gallery’s main space, each a rough landscape of fragmented layers of paint, among other things.

In these five huge canvases by Niall McClelland, what you see isn’t so much what he made as what he found. (KEITH BEATY / TORONTO STAR)

To call them paintings doesn’t give them their due. Each was made as McClelland splayed his canvas on the floor of his west-end studio, rolling on paint and letting it seep through to the filthy concrete surface beneath. What you see isn’t so much what he made but what he found: as he slowly peeled up the fabric, it took layers of floor — years of use, stratified one on top of the other — along with it.

Surveying the result, McClelland decided the accident, not the intent, was the art, which brings us to here and now. You can’t see the other side, but let’s trust his judgment. For the past several years, McLelland has been guided by an intuitive sense about his materials. He has photocopied generous leaves of paper to a thickly uniform copy-toner black, then folded them tight, waiting to discover the resulting geometries the creases left behind; and has taken expended printer inkjet cartridges and wrapped them in paper bound with rubber bands, leaving the ink to soak out and create its own eerie abstractions.

In each case, there’s a distinct lack of control, which is both the work’s appeal and the artist’s himself. In an art world that seems so powerfully driven to produce product — consistent, expected, within predetermined parameters — there’s something refreshing about an artist who allows his practice to be loose enough to just see what happens.

It’s an old school idea, in that distinctly high-modern way, where materials guide form as much as the maker him or herself. Think of the earliest, anthropomorphic forms of Constantin Brancusi, or the furtive abstract canvases of Willem de Kooning, and you’ll see what I mean. It was the journey, with no particular destination in mind, that produced the eventual work; control was a quaint relic of a bygone time.

Times change and along with them markets, and such letting go is less credo than referent to forge credible alliances with past eras. But McClelland means it. At Roenisch, he displays a rough diptych: one half is the pasty red frame of a silkscreen, long since cut away, and the other a waxy white surface tracked over with raccoon prints.

The red frame contained a screen he made; a necessary tool, really, to make the art; the white is more finders-keepers. McClelland happened on it on the street near his studio, abandoned to the trash collectors, not to mention the urban wildlife. He rescued it and resisted the urge to tidy it up, instead choosing to celebrate its rough path to the gallery wall.

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Like his canvases hanging nearby, the work is a kind of personalized urban archeology, and McClelland is a willing forager both of esthetics and materials. You can go down a checklist for echoes of the past — Dadaist ready-mades, conceptual, process-based work — but there’s an undeniable personal edge that makes the gestures McClelland’s own.

Speaking of archeology, a significant dig is taking place here into the artist’s own history. You can read the floor canvases or the diptych as brief entries into his diary, if you like — a record of his recent past, a where and when — but he goes than that.

Nearby, four starkly abstract blue-and-white silkscreens hang side by side. It’s called Bad Teenage Poetry, which is mysterious, given the form, and it needs a little explanation. What you’re looking at are the dismembered liner notes from a Rancid album from the early ’90s: off-the-rack retread punk rock angst reanimated and set stalking for a new generation of disaffected youth.

McClelland was one of them and here we find some introspection as he wipes clean the slate of youthful rebellion. Less oblique are a set of screens at the front of the gallery, among them punk slogans, or the tragic suicide note of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who killed himself, the note explains, because he couldn’t live with being a sellout.

Not to put him on the couch too much, but McClelland’s putting things in perspective. Raging against the machine seemed like a good idea at the time, he seems to be saying, but there are other ways to self-declare that stop short of nihilism. The works are eye-catching but have a strange coldness that the other works don’t. They embody the distance between the artist and his former self, a clinical strangeness almost like a specimen under glass, and maybe that’s the intent. But they’re less present and urgent than the other works, lacking their physicality and material sensuality, and I don’t know if I’d want to live with them.

What’s this got to do with Hot Sauce, you might be wondering.

Since the mid-’90s, the And1 shoe company has been running a semi-pro basketball league showcasing the narcissistic bravado of street ball, with its disregard for team play and premium on showy feats of individual athleticism. One of its marquee players was Philip Champion, a.k.a. Hot Sauce, a supremely gifted badass of a player whose gifts might have translated to the big leagues had he enjoyed winning more than humiliating the player defending him.

McClelland offers a slow-motion video of Hot Sauce highlights and it’s hypnotic chutzpah as Champion swans around the court, eviscerating defenders at will. But the message is clear: Grow up, already. Hot Sauce’s flash in the pan is destined to burn out, something Mclelland understands well enough as he prepares for what I expect to be a good, long haul.

Niall McClelland: Hot Sauce continues at the Clint Roenisch Gallery to Feb. 28. See http://clintroenisch.com/ clintroenisch.comEND for more information.

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